London-listed miners Randgold Resources and Fresnillo suffered the heaviest losses on the FTSE 100 in early trading, while mid cap Petropavlovsk was also under the cosh following downgrades by Citigroup.

The brokerage cut Randgold and Fresnillo to “sell” and Petropavlovsk to “neutral.”

“We have been concerned about gold and silver prices for some time and the recent further loss of momentum has concerned us even more,” its analysts said.

They noted that Randgold’s key assets are located in African countries, all of which have a recent history of political instability. For Fresnillo, Citi’s number crunchers pointed to the company’s rich valuation. And on Petropavlovsk, Citi said that Polymetal recently announced that it was having troubles with its POX technology, which is the same technology Petropavlovsk will be using in future.

Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley took a look at the U.K. capital goods sector.

European stock markets are looking pretty steady, if uneventful, with the focus on currencies and the upcoming G20 meeting in Moscow later this week. Jitters regarding Spain and Italy, which re-emerged last week, appear to have calmed down, so much so that several brokerages have become more confident on the Spanish bank sector.

Morgan Stanley said the outlook for Spanish banks is brightening. An improvement in deposit margins, lower operating expenditure and falling provisions will improve the profitability of Spanish banks in the second half of 2013, the brokerage said.

As a result, Morgan Stanley has upgraded Bankinter and Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria. BBVA’s improved funding profile and lower exposure to real estate reduce its need to de-lever, in Morgan Stanley’s view. Bankinter’s net interest income will remain challenged but given the improvement in the funding market, Morgan Stanley thinks an 8% return on tangible equity is achievable in 2015.

Exane BNP Paribas has downgraded tour and holiday operator Thomas Cook Group. This follows a share price rally of over 400% for Thomas Cook over the last six months and the brokerage thinks the valuation looks full. Exane has noted that consensus expectations are for the group’s Ebita (earnings before interest taxes and amortization) to reach £202 million this year. It said the group will benefit from some self-help initiatives but given the expected input costs inflation, it will also need to generate £94 million from other improvements.

“The risk of disappointment, notably as Thomas Cook will face demanding comparatives in the key summer period, is being ignored by the market,” Exane analysts said.

The British have, or had, quite a talent for inventing things. But, having done so, they usually contrived to hand over supremacy, immediately, to anyone else who looked at whatever they’d invented and decided to have a go too.

We might most obviously examine this trait with painful reference to football, which they did invent, and England’s lamentable performance in the World Cup. But this is Dow Jones so we’ll look at the field of industry instead.

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From modern steel-making and shipbuilding, to commercial nuclear power, it all started in the U.K., only to totter and collapse there as other nations started playing. It’s telling, and embarrassing, that the nation now needs French savoir faire to build new-generation nuclear reactors. But it does; once-plentiful home-grown talent having atrophied as government after government left energy security to the next mob and relied on dwindling North-Sea hydrocarbons instead. Very smart.

Further back, the industrial revolution may have been born in the U.K., but it quickly grew up and went somewhere else. Barely out of swaddling clothes, heavy industry reached Germany and the U.S., where the residents were soon showing up the Old Country. In the post-war world it swung by Japan, then South Korea, and, of course, now China is the place. Perhaps the whole process of industrialization is working its way back around and will ‘come home’ again one day. Those who want to see the U.K. economy rebalance, away from services and debt-fueled importing, would no doubt wish it so.

But a look at the FTSE 100, London’s blue-chip benchmark, won’t convince anyone that the day is at hand. For, if you strip out aerospace, which the U.K. still has a stake in, but it’s mostly military so it keeps it quiet, the number of capital-goods stocks is a less-than-stunning two. Or 0.5% of the total weighting.

Moreover the ‘industrial engineering’ and ‘electronic and electrical equipment’ sectors are now entirely vacant. Indeed the last engineer to enter the FTSE 100 was Tomkins, back in September 2002. It had been thrown out again by the end of 2004.

Where the top of the U.K. corporate pile was once crowded with ‘metal bashers’, it’s now populated by mining companies, which dig stuff out of one part of the earth and sell it to metal bashers somewhere else. Then there are banks, which we supposed were busy financing real-world industry somewhere before we found out they were swapping worthless pieces of mortgage-backed paper with each other instead. And we also have the pharmaceutical companies, devising cures and palliatives for high blood pressure, diabetes, impotence and other diseases of the prosperous in a post-industrial world.